Drag Me to Hell is a horror movie directed by Sam Raimi and starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, Reggie Lee, Adriana Barraza, and Lorna Raver.
Christine Brown (Lohman) is a loan officer trying to get promoted to assistant manager of a bank, and in trying to prove herself to her frankly unrealistically reasonable boss (Paymer), she turns an old lady (Raver) down for an extension on her mortgage. Said lady turns out to be not only terrifying and kind of gross, but down with some pretty powerful magic, and attacks Christine in her car and tears a button off her coat. Christine, with the help of a medium (Rao), conveniently running a storefront right next to where she and her boyfriend Clay (Long) are walking, discovers she has three days until a demon called Lamia will, well, drag [her] to Hell.
This demon is not fucking around, either. It gives her hallucinations, but also makes her nose bleed like a fire hose at work, slams her up against walls, and gives her nightmares of swallowing flies and other gross shit. Christine tries to find the old woman to get rid of the curse, but she's already died. She tries sacrificing her adorable little kitten to Lamia, but Lamia wants none of that. She eventually gets a psychic (Barraza) who has tangled with Lamia before to help her, but that plan also goes awry and she's left with one option - give the cursed button away to someone else, thus turning Lamia's attention to them.
(Spoiler: She tries, but it doesn't work because she gives away the wrong thing, and Christine is indeed dragged to Hell. Alas.)
This movie has 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's interesting to me because it's a kind of gross horror movie, so why did it resonate so hard? (I don't disagree, by the way, I think it's a pretty great movie.) I think it's because, for one thing, it's tight. The cast is small and we get time to get to know most of them, and even the smaller roles like Barraza (and Molly Cheek as Clay's overbearing rich snot of a mother) get to establish themselves. The leads also have great chemistry - Rao's Rham Jas clearly wants to help Christine, but is mindful of his own safety and soul (and pocketbook). Clay acts as a voice of reason, but he can see when something is important to Christine and supports her (and the movie ends on his horrified expression, which is really effective). Lorna Raver brings some real pathos to what could have been a kind of caricature role. Of course, Christine herself anchors the movie, and I like that she's not an extreme. She's a basically good person put in impossible situations, and honestly she doesn't deserve what she gets.
And more to the point, the movie doesn't try to convince us she does. Sure. the old lady's granddaughter (Bojana Novakovic) says she deserves what's coming, but from her perspective Christine took her grandma's house away (not really what happened). Christine ultimately refuses to pass along her torment to another living person, even someone who arguably deserves it more than she does (that'd be Reggie Lee's Stu, her scheming coworker who 100% would have turned down the old lady out of hand).
I think one of the reasons the movie works as well as it does is that Christine does lose. If she'd pulled the fat out of the fire at the last minute, it would have felt empty or trite, and it would have been just a gross-out movie. Likewise, if she'd never had a chance, it would have felt pointless. But Christine has multiple opportunities to escape her fate, and either luck (and Lamia) conspire against her or she refuses a cost she feels is too high, and ultimately she goes to Hell because of it. It's not fair, it's tragic, but tragedies are good stories.
(Also, it's one of those movies that makes me imagine how a SAVE team in Chill would approach it, and that's fun for me.)
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Evil Under the Sun
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